Baby It's You

Chapter 4.

And so the hurricane began. 

If anyone had asked you what had been going through your head when the second letter returned the next day, you could not have said at all. All the world was going through your head in a single moment, and all that you could catch and hold was the thought that the address on the front was different now. Vancouver, a little motel with a funny little name that could almost have been a pun except that you did not get the joke. 

And then the letter, and he asked you about your day, the way he would every day forever if only you knew that then. Told you you wouldn't like him if you knew who he was, and you whispered into the evening light that you would, you always would. There was nothing about him that could push you away now, from this most mysterious of boys and the stories that he told. 

Day after day after day, and every other day his letters came. Regular as clockwork, like the banks of the Thames you missed so much, and soon you would be there in time. The addresses on the letters changing time after time as every night you dreamed of where he might be now. If he was thinking about you, ever. Seattle, then Memphis, then Dallas, Houston, Atlanta. Indianapolis, so close you thought that you could feel him as you read him back again and again, sitting on your windowsill as the world fell away behind you. 

He was loud, he was annoying, he was the one that people noticed - after they had noticed everybody else. He was the one that they forgot the morning after, he was the lonely one. You didn't think that you had ever met anyone quite so lonely in your life. With every letter you thought this time you knew him, and with the next you knew that you had never known him at all. He was an enigma, and his answer would change the world. 

An enigma who wrote to you everyday, the way your boyfriend never did. 

Sure, you had called Ben. One morning when it had rained overnight, and you had sat in the hallway for over an hour, waiting for the phone line to be free. Waiting for the girl with the phone to stop telling her boyfriend that he was the best thing in the world to her. Wondering why you had never said those things to Ben. Knowing that the best thing in the world to you was some boy you had never met before, and the words he wrote like starlight. Like the magic that he wrote into the work you had never loved so much in all your life before. The universe you knew, the universe you loved again and again in every letter he wrote, for suddenly he was close enough to touch. 

When the girl had left the phone behind at last, the only thing that you could tell your Ben was that you loved him, and even that was never true. 

Summer passed you, every minute, and before you knew it summer was over, and the park was golden with the leaves that fell around your ankles when you knelt by the river to write your letters every day. Writing, writing more and more every day like you were drunk on the ecstasy of the love you could pretend was his. Like you were his with every breath you took. And with every day it was getting more difficult to pretend that you were not. 

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Roger had never been very good at keeping secrets. Not when he had kissed the teacher's daughter when they were twelve, and he had run home to tell his mum. Nor when he was fifteen, and had failed one of his GCSE's and tried to keep it from his parents for fear of being kicked out. He wasn't kicked out, as fate would have it, but perhaps that would have been kinder than the row he came home to that afternoon. Nor even when he had kissed the girl that Tim had liked, aged nineteen and rich off the fame of a world that knew his name, even when it didn't really. That had been the worst of it, the fight that might have torn apart Smile if Brian hadn't been there to break it up. Brian, who was never part of any drama. Only the peace-maker in every fight that Roger had to start. He didn't know entirely why he got into fights so much. Perhaps it was that people never liked him very much.